MUST READ: Letter to Nigerian youths by a concerned professional

The toughest challenge employers are facing right now is where to locate ‘the right’ employees.

We’ve been trying to hire three new staff for over a year. I’ve interviewed quite a ton of graduates of law, accounting and other social sciences.

99% of BSc Accounting holders are UNABLE to use Microsoft excel spreadsheets. The majority of law graduates could not write coherently, and have no legal research experience outside of their final year projects. One graduate of English/Literature has not read any book outside of the recommended texts in school. 99% of job seekers have no writing sample, no published product or past work that is independently verifiable. That means, Nigeria’s biggest problem right now, isn’t unemployment, but unemployability.

Sometimes, you meet a job seeker with a charming personality, and you try to stretch the rules a bit. You request for his/her Facebook profile to get a sense of his/her interests, passions and extracurricula engagements. You only find posts about sex, sex, sex, sex, boyfriends, girlfriends, crushes, and more sex. What a turn off!

Well, I’ve got some news for you: You cannot sex your way to a prosperous future. You cannot sex your way to greatness. The CEOs of all Fortune500 companies have sex too. CEOs of the WB, IMF, UN, CBN, AfDB etc are all having sex too. The difference is that they spend their times productively, and regard sex as a purely private activity.

I just crossed the border control at Schipol Airport, self-service passport control machines have replaced hundreds of personnel that formerly handled that activity. I just stayed in multi-storey 5-star hotels where machines have replaced the need for human workforce.

So, in the nearest future, if you have no talent, skill, or knowledge of comparable standard to these artificially-intelligent machines providing high-quality services, you’d be left behind. Far behind. Your prospects of breaking the shackles of poverty and joblessness will get thinner.

Please, invest in yourself. While waiting for that job, learn something new and hone your skills. Volunteer your services. Consider doing some unpaid work. Write more clearly. Read more. Reallocate the money you spend on expensive weaves and phones to prepare yourself for the future. That added value you bring can make you stand out from the crowd.